Waiting For The Man

Mother Night

If I’d been born in Germany, I suppose I would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snowbanks, warming myself with my secretly virtuous insides.

- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Introduction to Mother Night (1966)

Pyramid

This Song is an Exercise in Archaeology

Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, 'cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love, you occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time - it's because these groups think there's something very special about it either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has, you know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love.

These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love - or so they would have you believe, anyway - but these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality. I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (1979)

This is an archaeology exercise really, going back in time to figure out what these people were all about in '78 or whenever it was, at the time I was talking about the ubiquitous presence of the love song and why it was that people sang about falling in and out of love and anything else that loosely fell into the love bracket, or as Charles Aznavour may or may not have said, I don't think that what happens in people's romantic lives should be processed in language of mystification.

- Gang of Four, "Anthrax" (2005)

Storm Emma

With spring looking like it's finally arrived in Ireland, I thought it was about time I put up these videos I took of Storm Emma back at the start of March.

Waiting for the Storm

The harbour at Dún Laoghaire, before Storm Emma arrives.

A New Career in a New Town

I Want to Hear Now, the Modern Sound/So I Won't Feel Alone at Night

I got a new stereo for Christmas. The old one is the one I've had since Christmas 1995, and is showing its age: there's no DAB, the CD player doesn't play all CDs, there's no way of attaching an MP3 player, and there's a twin tape deck of the kind no-one uses anymore. But this is the only stereo I've ever owned: I used it to hear most of the music I've ever heard for the first time, and it was with me from secondary school and 6th Form on to Nottingham, London, Liverpool, and then back here. It was, indeed, the radio on to help me from being lonely late at night.

It's wrong, of course, to feel emotions about mass-produced items of consumer electronics, but I don't think I'll be taking the stereo to the tip in the way that I did my old DVD player earlier in the year. It also seems unlikely that I'll ever have any kind of feelings about any other stereos.

Christmas at Song Be

At midnight, celebration was interrupted by the sound of machine gun fire in the distance. The revelers trooped outside to see if they were going to have to fight on Christmas Eve. There were hard words concerning the ancestry of the enemy. Across the wire, across the outpost line, across the valley of no-man’s land were the crests occupied habitually by the “opposition.” From these heights there rose a stream of green, Soviet made “tracer.” The celebrants contemplated this for a minute, and then Suarez suggested a reply. An M-60 machine gun emerged from the house, and while one man fired red tracer into the air, another held the bipod above his head and another fed the gun its belted ammunition. The streams of bullets crossed in the black, star-studded sky. The VC gun fell silent, as did the American. There was a hush as warriors waited for some sign that the hope of common humanity yet lived. The VC fire resumed. Now there were three guns shooting green stars into the blackness. The MI men’s gun chattered merrily, spilling a river of shell casings into the street. Red and green filled the night.

- W. Patrick Lang, The Huron Carol (2007)

An account of a small incident that took place in Vietnam at Christmas 1968. Like most stories of Christmas truces during wars, there's a sad epilogue.

New York Night

New York Night, No. 2 (1921) by George Ault

Keep Off the Grass

Why Cut Me Down?

The Margin For Individual Decision

I really have no idea where Marxist academia gets its reputation for being gloomy from.

From Vicente Lull and Rafael Micó's Archaeology of the Origin of the State (2011).

Tin Legs

The BBC's "Horrible Histories" tells kids about Douglas Bader:

Bad Film Night No.5: Miami Connection (1987)

 Survival: The Ultimate Test...

Dear Nintendo

Dear Nintendo,

I am writing to apply for the position of game designer with your company. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than any game before them. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend and that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she's "damaged goods", a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom "do you still love me?" you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower and your older sister still has casual sex that she confides might bring back a feeling she's certain she didn't imagine. Where the plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says "I hate to fly".

Yours,

Joey Comeau 

- Joey Comeau, Overqualified (2009)

Dawn On The Avenue De Boavista

It's dawn now in Porto, and I'm the only one still awake. I first turned the data back on on my mobile phone just after 22:00 last night. I did it in a "Give it to me straight, doctor" mood, and found some positive news. It's just been announced that there's a hung parliament.

I've no idea what's about to happen, or whether the people I've given my conditional support to over the last two years will gravely let me down or lead to disaster.

What interests me, though, is how wrong all the Smart Boys who went to a grammar school, or an expensive private school , and maybe then Oxbridge were. After all, those educations made their ideas intrinsically More Serious than those of someone who went to the state school down the road, and less elite univesities. That's the natural order of things.

Don't expect to see too much discussion of that over the next few days, though.

Beagle World Record Attempt

About a month ago I went with a friend - and her Beagle - to the Beagle World Record Attempt at Capesthorne Hall in Cheshire. Here are some of my photos and videos.

Mr. Bingley making friends.

Citizen Journalist Beagle is hungry for the truth.



Hurley-Burley in the off-lead paddock.



Waiting for the world record attempt to get underway.



On the walk.

Bad Film Night No.4: Deadly Prey (1987)

In Vietnam He Was The Best...He Still Is.

A Mirror’s Temperature is Always Zero

One of his colleagues has described the haunting and profoundly revealing occasion when Heydrich came home at night to his brilliantly lit apartment and suddenly saw his reflection in a large wall mirror. In an attack of cold rage he 'whipped his pistol from his holster and fired two shots at this double', the ever and tormentingly present negation of himself, from which he could free himself in liquor and in the splintered glass, but not in reality. He was prisoner of this figure of negation, he lived in a world populated by the self-created chimeras of of a hostile distrust, scented behind everything treachery, intrigue or the snares of hidden emnity, and thought only in terms of dependence - the most impressive embodiment of that vulgarized Darwinist principle in whose light the world was revealed to National Socialist ideology: life seen only as struggle. Himmler said of him that he was 'the embodiment of distrust - the "hypersuspicious", as people called called him - nobody could endure it for long'.

- Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich (1963)

Like Luke and R2-D2, Me and That DVD Player Were

On Sunday I took my old DVD player to the recycling place. Mum and Dad got it me for Christmas 2000, I think, and it's been with me ever since. There are plenty of reasons to get rid of it: it's the size of a house, the SCART socket seems to have broken, and it's from the days before HDMI. Plus I have a Bluray player these days. Nontheless, if you lived with me in Nottingham, London, or Liverpool, this was what we used to watch things on.

The Year 2017

March Violets

FIRST MAN: Have you noticed how the March Violets have managed to completely overtake Party veterans like you and me?

SECOND MAN: You’re right. Perhaps if Hitler had also waited a little before climbing on to the Nazi bandwagon he’d have become Führer quicker too.

- Das Schwarze Korps, November 1935

Sol Niger

Futures, Unevenly Distributed

Mumbai in 2014. Photograph by Paul Needham.

Dreaming in Moscow

Found here.

"They've Got Nowhere to Go"

While New Labour's chief ideologues promoted the idea that class divisions were no longer relevant – part of the 'old ways of working and doing things', in Tony Blair's words – working class people of all races were feeling the sharp end of the New Labour project. Inequality of income, which had soared under Margaret Thatcher, continued to rise. In 2004, well before the financial crash, real wages stagnated for the bottom half of earners and fell for the bottom third. Disguised by the availability of cheap credit, social mobility had in fact stalled. The aspirations of many were increasingly out of reach.

Plentiful immigration, which grew further after 2004, when eight former Eastern Bloc countries joined the EU, was only one factor in keeping wages low – a 'flexible' labour market, where employers were much freer to hire and fire than elsewhere in Europe, was the broader picture – but fears about immigration were hyped by right-wing newspapers and pressure groups such as Migration Watch. Perception mattered: by the end of the New Labour era, only 18 percent saw immigration as a problem in their area, but 76 percent saw it as a national problem.

In 2009, Gordon Brown's attempt to deal with growing discontent as the economy turned sour was a disastrous speech in which he promised 'British jobs for British workers' – a slogan that could have come straight out of a far-right propaganda handbook, and one that was thrown back in his face in 2009 by oil refiners workers in Lincolnshire, who staged wildcat strikes in protest at their wages and conditions being undercut by several hundred European contract workers. Even this ham-fisted attempt to address the issue was too late. During New Labour's pomp, Hain told me, few at the top were willing to listen. Blair, along with his closest allies, simply did not see a problem. According to Hain, his warning in 1999 was met with a complacent response. 'Peter Mandelson said to me, "your preoccupation with the working-class vote is wrong. They've got nowhere to go."'

- Daniel Trilling, Bloody Nasty People: The Rise of Britain's Far Right (2012)

Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don’t need to promise any desirable and realistic change. If anything, they are more comforting and trustworthy if predicated on the notion that the future is beyond rescue, for that chimes more closely with people’s private experiences.

- Will Davis, "Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit" (2016)

The Story Continues

Barely Audible Intimations of His Own Murder

In 1929 the writer Evelyn Waugh came to Crete on a cruise "to admire the barbarities of Minoan culture". In the Herakleion Museum "except for one or two examples of animal sculpture", he wrote, "I found nothing to suggest any genuine aesthetic feeling at all". On the merits of Minoan painting he was perspicaciously uncertain, "since only a few square inches of the vast area exposed to our consideration are earlier than the last 20 years". In the restorations, he detects "a somewhat inappropriate predilection for covers of Vogue". At Knossos, he continues, "I do not think that it can only be imagination and the recollection of a bloodthirsty mythology which makes something fearful and malignant of the cramped galleries and stunted alleys...these rooms that are mere blind passages at the end of sunless staircases". As for the throne "here an aging despot might crouch and have borne to him, along the walls of a whispering gallery, barely audible intimations of his own murder" (Waugh 1930: 136-7).

- Gerald Cadogan, 'The Minoan Distance': The impact of Knossos upon the twentieth century (2004)

Highlights From A Subtitling Failure

Netflix UK recently encountered an error in which the BBC nature documentary Planet Earth went out with the subtitles from the Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden show. Some of the resultant highlights:

Owls Disappointed By Labour Leadership Candidates #1

The first in an occasional series.

Donald Trump is a Candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America

We Can't Stop Here, This Is Snake Country!

Fieldwalking survey has its own charms, and its own perils.

I'll Let You Know When The Bodies Start Turning Up

Taken last week:

Taken today:

Top Bantz With The Ya̧nomamö

The Ya̧nomamö will do almost anything for honey, one of the most prized delicacies in their own diet. One of my cynical onlookers—the fellow who had earlier watched me eating frankfurters—immediately recognized the honey and knew that I would not share the tiny precious bottle. It would be futile to even ask. Instead, he glared at me and queried icily, “Sh
aki! What kind of animal semen are you pouring onto your food and eating?” His question had the desired effect and my meal ended.

 - Napoleon Chagnon, Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People (1968)

If things had worked out differently, that guy could've been a Vine superstar.

Hard Boiled Athenians

In the absence of a public prosecutor, it was up to private individuals to take one another to court, and they would rarely do so unless they were motivated by personal hostility. Demosthenes was once charged with desertion by a group of his enemies, but the case never came to court. One of his prosecutors had allegedly been bought off, and was later found dead – brutally murdered and mutilated by a madman who, by some strange coincidence, had once been a friend of Demosthenes'.

Hans van Wees discusses Demosthenes 21.103 and Aeschines 2.148 in Greek Warfare: Myths and realities (2004).

Poststructuralists in Foxholes #1

The first in an occasional series.

"Baudrillard Was Here", painted on an abandoned bunker at Bnaider, Kuwait (Artist: Alia Farid).

Hotspur Press

Bad Film Night No.3: The Room (2003)

Can You Ever Really Trust Anyone?

Theme From "Burn Warehouse Burn"

We want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries!… Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with color-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls’ Day—that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Gioconda, I grant you that… But I don’t admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely?… Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of hurtling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolonged supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sickly, the prisoner… But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

So let them come, the gay incendiaries with charred fingers! Here they are! Here they are!… Come on! Set fire to the library shelves! Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!… Oh, the joy of seeing the glorious old canvases bobbing adrift on those waters, discolored and shredded!… Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!

- Filippo Marinetti, The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909)

Writing Cheques You Can't Cash

An extract from LaVoy Finicum's self-published novel Only By Blood and Suffering (2015):

Video footage from Tuesday of LaVoy Finicum against two members of the Oregon State Police:

I Had To Phone Someone So I Picked On You

When I was about 8 or 9 I saw David Bowie on TV, it was the Top of the Pops performance of "Starman", and it must have been on a clip show of some sort. I was blown away, although I wasn't into music at the time, and wouldn't be until 1995.

It seems like a long way from there to here. 

Bad Film Night No.2: Low Blow (1986)

The Deadliest Weapon Is Still Your Fist.

Gary Cooper Is Dead

We’re not in a Frank Capra movie. Gary Cooper is not going to give Trump his comeuppance. He is not going to die of his own mania in a burning barn or find God and quit the race to become a missionary. He is not a grand conspiracy meant to sneak Hillary Clinton into the White House. Denial accomplishes nothing.

He’s not desperate and he’s not losing.

And retreating to the comfort of our curated peers on social media, where everybody knows Trump is a villain, gets us nowhere. We don’t need better or smarter or funnier or more marketable ways to call him a villain. We don’t need to split hairs on whether he’s a fascist or just an almost-fascist. We don’t need any more hyperbole soloing. That won’t change the mind of a single Trump supporter.

From Kaleb Horton's piece "On Donald Trump and Preying Upon Weakness".

Reduce Speed Now

Internet culture's ability to reexamine, remix, and reinterpret things is my favourite thing about it. Case in point: the Soundcloud account chipmunkson16speed, which plays cover versions from an old Chipmunks novelty record (a bit of internet research reveals that it's 1990's "Born To Rock") at 16 RPM rather than the correct 33 1⁄3 RPM. The results are surprising. Blondie's "Call Me" gains a distinctly doom metal feel:

Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth", meanwhile, is transformed into some sort of Neil Young/Beach Boys collaboration:



And while it's not as good as the others, Michael Jackson's "Bad" played this way is very Trent Reznor at the start:

Bad Film Night No.1: Samurai Cop (1989)

You Have The Right To Remain Silent...Dead Silent.

A Very Dangerous Drug for Young Men

This is why Joy Division can be a very dangerous drug for young men. They seem to be presenting The Truth (they present themselves as doing so). Their subject, after all, is depression. Not sadness or frustration, rock's standard downer states, but depression: depression: whose difference from mere sadness consists in its claim to have uncovered the (final, unvarnished) Truth about life and desire.

The depressive experiences himself as walled off from the lifeworld, so that his own frozen inner life - or inner death - overwhelms everything; at the same time, he experiences himself as evacuated, totally denuded, a shell: there is nothing except the inside, but the inside is empty.
...
The Aesthetes want the world promised by the sleeves and the sound, a pristine black and white realm unsullied by the grubby compromises and embarrassments of the everyday. The empiricists insist on just the opposite: on rooting the songs back in the quotidian at its least elevated and, most importantly, at its least serious. 'Ian was a laugh, the band were young lads who liked to get pissed, it was all a bit of fun that got out of hand...' It's important to hold onto both of these Joy Divisions - the Joy Division of Pure Art, and the Joy Division who were 'just a laff' - at once. For if the truth of Joy Division is that they were Lads, then Joy Division must be the truth of Laddism. And so it would appear: beneath all the red-nosed downer-fuelled jollity of the past two decades, mental illness has increased 70% amongst adolescents. Suicide remains one of the most common sources of death for young males.

- Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures (2014)

Festival Number 6

The Dialectic In Action

Technically

Well, when you've run out of Toyota pickups... (Picture from the @HalaJaber Twitter account, and is apparently of an IS fighter in Libya).

Five Years

I'll Be There For You

Ross' behavior becomes more erratic. No one has seen Chandler for weeks. Ross keeps making stews. No one sees him go to the grocery store
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Yet the stews continue. Ross eyes are dark wells and his gums start to recede. The stews continue.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Ross just mumbles incoherently about "THE DEEP KNOWLEDGE AND THE CRIMSON HUNTRESS MOTHER" when asked any question.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Joey has gone missing
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley The skin around Ross' mouth is grey and leathery. He doesn't seem to cast a shadow. All he does is make more and more stews.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Rachel begins to delve into occult studies in response to Ross' change. She becomes thrice marked to the Crone and Crow, daughter of Shadows
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley She tries to enlist Monica to strengthen the binding rites of the Unsung Silent Ones. Monica threatens to tell Ross
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Monica disappears. Rachel can now see the Forms that Move Beneath. It all becomes so clear. She knows what must be done.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

@jmshiveley Rachel treads the Mansions of Silence. The taste of iron on her tongue and lips crimson stained. There are no more boundaries.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Phoebe merely sits atop the Throne on Nine Cold Flames in the Pit of Unending Eyes. Everything has gone according to her prophecies.
— Jordan Shiveley (@jmshiveley) April 3, 2015

Three Megabytes of Hot RAM

From over at Design Interactions comes an intriguing look at the social network you could've had in the 1980s:

I can't work out whether this is something people are actually doing, or an art project. Maybe that's the point? Either way, the idea of colonising the abandoned analogue frequencies is cyberpunk in its truest spirit. I'm told that Walter Benjamin saw surrealism as finding a revolutionary potential in obsolete things, in modernity's detritus. This seems a good example. 

Richard "Snakey Spine" Plantagenet

I first posted this on Facebook at the time, but given today's events it seems apposite again. Here's Jamie from over at Blood & Treasure on Richard III, from February 2013:

Half the country – and the twee half at that – seems to be getting in a tizzy about a man who, given the medieval level of state formation, was basically a fucking gangster; and what’s more a gangster among gangsters: the royals were all gangsters until Cromwell taught them a little circumspection. That little princes in the tower wet job should be a clue with Richard, but there seems to be a general feeling that it was dignified by being done as statecraft. Or maybe it's a Kray twins thing: 'they only murdered their own', etc

Sure, he was a lawgiver: so was Lucky Luciano. And sure, there was that time in 1215 when the underbosses ganged up on a weak capo and took a bunch of diabolical bleeding liberties. But Richard ‘Snakey Spine’ Plantagenet played the same role in Our Island Story as Jake ‘Greasy Thumb’ Guzick did in the history of Chicago. Under a car park is exactly the right place for him, at least in the absence of a flyover or a crocodile filled swamp. 

That's An Archaeological Theory Joke, Son

Ye Wretched

Bodies

Seems More Like Sub Territory...

Achilles on the Plains

Like Achilles, Roman Nose had stayed out of the morning battle, and like Achilles, his absence had been keenly felt by his warriors. The day before he had destroyed the charm of his sacred war bonnet. One of the taboos connected with it was that he must not eat food taken from the pot with an iron implement. At a feast given by the Sioux, Roman Nose ate meat served by a squaw with an iron fork. Tall Bull, his friend, called his attention to the error and urged him to take purification ceremonies at once. But that very night Forsyth's command was discovered and Roman Nose had no time for the ceremonies before the battle.

He stayed out of the first charge, saying he would die if he made it. But he was such a power that the other Cheyennes kept urging him. In mid-afternoon he suddenly decided to go into the fight. Putting on the war bonnet, he mounted. With a wave of his great arm, the giant summoned his warriors. A moment later they were charging. 

Forsyth's men fought this new danger desperately. At the dead run, Roman Nose thundered down upon them. Just before he reached the trenches, a shot from some bushes to one side, brought him crashing down. Jack Stilwell and two companions were hiding there. Roman Nose's followers scattered.

The place where Roman Nose fell was on the river bank. Painfully he dragged himself out of sight among the bushes. There was he found by his people and carried away. He died in the Cheyenne village that night.

- Paul Iselin Wellman, Death on the Prairie: The Thirty Years' Struggle for the Western Plains (1934) 

I read this account of the death of the great Cheyenne warrior Roman Nose more than 10 years ago, when I was a student at UCL. It stayed with me, although I could not remember the details of names and dates, so I was pleased to finally be able to locate the passage again on the internet.

"But I Love...I Love All...All People..."

On 13 November 1989, six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Erich Mielke addressed the parliament of the German Democratic Republic in his role as Minister of State Security. When one member of the parliament objected to his use of the term "comrades" to address them, he replied "But I love...I love all...all people...".  The room could only laugh.

I know about Mielke, and about the above clip, because of Philip Kerr's novel Field Grey (2010).

RPG LOL

Taken in Libya, this is probably the best illustration of how 21st century insurgencies are fought. Image from the @Rekka_K Twitter account.

Computer Security

New computer security question #1: "As a child, what color was the bucket that you used to bring water from the nearest well or stream?"

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014

Computer security question #2: "Which disease came closest to killing you before the age of 5?"

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014

Computer security question #3: "In your experience as a child, which country's occupation army was the least vengeful?"

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014

Computer security question #4: "What memory of violence do you try hardest to suppress?"

— Werner Twertzog (@WernerTwertzog) September 13, 2014

Dame With A W

In honour of the release of Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, here's one of the finest moments from Shortpacked!:

Centenary

'I say, is it really true that the French artillery had to fire on their infantry?' Delaforce asked. 'To drive them over the top?'
'Absolutely,' Finlayson said. 'They had a mutiny. The troops wouldn't leave the trenches, so the French generals laid down a barrage on them. That soon shifted them.'
'What happened afterwards?'
'Afterwards? There was no afterwards. Why d'you think they didn't want to get out of the trenches?'

- Derek Robinson, Goshawk Squadron (1971) 

A Storm In Macedonia

I'm currently at Olynthos in northern Greece, excavating on the Classical city site. On Tuesday we couldn't work because of torrential rain and a thunderstorm. During the storm, lightning struck the electricity pylon just across the road, about 20 metres from where I was sitting. The pylon was knocking out and a small fire started, which had to be put out by the local fire brigade. These are the photos I took of that:

 

In terms of actual archaeology, we don't really have any features in the trench yet, but we have had a couple of interesting finds: a stone tool which might be prehistoric, but could also be the sort of thing a Classical potter might have used to burnish pottery, and a sling bullet which is almost certainly from the siege which destroyed Olynthos in 348 BC. This is my photo of the latter:

 

EDIT 27/07/14: I've taken the picture of the sling bullet down, both because it is unpublished archaeological material, and because we don't want to encourage looting on the site.

Kohima-Imphal

While the 70th anniversary of D-Day got fairly extensive coverage recently, I've seen pretty much nothing about the fact that it's also 70 years since the battle of Kohima-Imphal, the most significant battle of the Second World War in south-east Asia. It's not too difficult to discern the difference in coverage, as fighting to liberate France from the Nazis has very different connotations to fighting in order to keep Burma British.

Nonetheless I feel I should mention it, as my grandfather on my Dad's side was there, with the 2nd battalion of the South Lancashire Regiment. This article suggests that there are now only three surviving members of the Burma Star Association, although, of course, the vast majority of Commonwealth troops in the battle were Indian. Also, Dad tells me that Grandad never actually joined the Burma Star Association, believing it to be full of clerks and other rear-echelon types.

I Survived Able Archer 83

Borrowing a trick from Blood & Treasure, an article over at the Guardian suggests that Manchester was destined to be the recipient of "one or two 'airbursts' of up to five megatons" in the event of war with the Soviet Union. The Nukemap website suggests the following effects for a five megaton airburst over Manchester:



Heaton Chapel is just to the north-west of Stockport, so I don't fancy two year-old me's chances very much.

Minimum Wage

J.T. once asked me what sociologists had to say about gangs and inner-city poverty. I told him that some sociologists believed in a "culture of poverty" - that is, poor blacks didn't work because they didn't value employment as highly as other ethnic groups did, and they transmitted this attitude across generations.

"So you want me to take pride in the job, and you're only paying me minimum wage?" J.T. countered. "It don't sound like you think much about the job yourself."

- Sudhir Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day: A rogue sociologist crosses the line (2008)

Coup Leader Kills Himself

Nirvana in London, 1991

Writing Terror

So for various reasons, I've recently been investigating what's been written about the European terrorism of the 1970s/1980s. One of the things which is striking is how the "terrorist memoir" seems to be a niche sub-genre these days. This year one of November 17 published Γεννήθηκα 17 Νοέμβρη, but there are a couple of efforts from Baader-Meinhoff and other German groups, and the occasional Red Brigader. Even Britain gets in on the act with Stuart Christie's Granny Made Me An Anarchist. What's curious is that even though right-wing terrorist groups were pretty prominent during the same period, they don't seem to be represented in the memoirs market, and I'm wondering why that is. Lack of the literary/intellectual tradition that the left has? Publishers less sympathetic? Something else?

The Wrong Kind of Cynicism

And, vexingly for Eric, on the rare occasions he’s convinced a journalist that the CIA murdered his father, the revelation has not been greeted with horror. One writer declined Eric’s invitation to attend his press conference saying, ‘We know the CIA kills people. That’s old news.’
In fact, Eric told me, this would be the first time anyone had ever publicly charged the CIA with murdering an American citizen.
‘People have been so brainwashed by fiction,’ said Eric as we drove to the local Kinko’s to pick up the press releases for the conference, ‘so brainwashed by the Tom Clancy thing, they think, “We know this stuff. We know the CIA does this.” Actually, we know nothing of this. There’s no case of this, and all this fictional stuff is like an immunization against reality. It makes people think they know things that they don’t know and it enables them to have a kind of superficial quasi-sophistication and cynicism which is just a thin layer beyond which they’re not cynical at all.’

- Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004)

The story of Eric's father, Frank Olson, and why he may have been murdered, can be found here, as well as in Ronson's book.